Sunday, October 24, 2010

Great Introduction to Alternate Reality Games

The folks at Tandem Learning are running another ARG at DevLearn this year. If you've never played this type of social game before then now is your chance to experience a really fun one. And you don't need to be going to DevLearn to play.

Just sign up at www.drstrangelearn.com and then join a team or start your own. The best part is that while these are fun to play they also have a purpose as "Instructional Alternate Reality Games". So you will absolutely be learning and consuming a lot of information while you play.

The simplest explanation of Alternate Reality Games (ARG) is that a story is fragmented over multiple locations (both real and virtual) and a community of players then work to piece the story back together.

[Alternative reality games]…are informational scavenger hunts which disperse information across a broad range of different media channels. This goes back to the pioneering work which Neil Young did for Majestic, arguably one of the earliest and most influential examples of this practice. Second, they encourage players to create new media tools which they can use to process and communicate information. And third, they can only be solved by people working together as teams and tapping the power of social networks to solve problems. So Alternative reality games are, in a sense, the perfect illustration of all of the principles which I see shaping the media landscape at the present time.